or if he did succeed in making it hard for businesses in the US to respond to downturns with reductions in expenses, companies will just fund more business friendly, flexible markets to invest in.

All that said, while I think the caricature of the heartless CEO is overblown (every CEO I've known and worked with closely has cared very much about the company they led/built along with its employees, and were not heartless SOBs), the caricature of VC/PE/Hedge fund types in my experience is more spot on. Those guys are generally heartless sharks that truly don't care about anything but the financials. The tone of that note doesn't surprise me at all, and I totally get your reaction to it.

But I will also say that they are generally spot on in terms the importance of acting quickly and decisively to changing circumstances. I was with a company in the late 90s through early 2000s that went through a chapter 11 (we were in the telco test equipment space and grew very rapidly during the boom from the fiber build out, and then got caught up in the bust following the over build out of fiber). We ended up doing 8 rounds of layoffs over a 2 year period of time, taking out about 2/3 of employees in the process. The layoffs were necessary for the company to survive. But the CEO, who grew up with the company, was very hesitant to do layoffs (the company was sort of "his baby") even when the reduction in revenue dictated that there was no other choice. As a result, we moved slower, less aggressively, and less decisively, and over the long run, I think more people lost their jobs than would have had we acted more aggressively and decisively up front.